Learning Environments

21 Jul

Posted at 15:14h in Community Organizing, Creativity, Culture, Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, Outside of School, Psychology of Becoming, Youth Development

July 20, 2011 I've written before about the All Stars Project's unique and fabulous UX, a free, open-to-all, university-style development center, but it's worth mentioning over and over. This new project creates its curriculum from suggestions for courses from those who want to learn and ideas from those who want to...

21 Jun

Posted at 19:15h in Human Development, Learning Environments, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapeutics

June 21, 2011 Fred Newman and I have written quite a bit about the specific ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein has influenced the social therapeutic practice and our understanding and articulation of the practice. As I teach a course/lead a conversation, “The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman,” these past three weeks (as...

11 Jun

Posted at 23:21h in Creativity, Culture, Education, Language, Learning Environments, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming

June 11, 2011 At the East Side Institute we’ve conducted online courses for almost ten years now. They’re not conventional, didactic courses but rather exercises in creating conversation and a conversational relationship while simultaneously playing with concepts. Sometimes these courses work beautifully and sometimes they work less well. My colleague Gwen...

21 Apr

Posted at 01:31h in Community Organizing, Culture, Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, Outside of School, Psychology of Becoming

  April 20, 2011 One evening while studying in England, a young Ugandan man named Peter Nsubuga watched a BBC documentary in the home he was staying. The program was “Children of Africa.” Peter was no stranger to the scenes he watched, having grown up in the very conditions shown on the...

04 Apr

Posted at 17:55h in Culture, Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, Outside of School, Psychology of Becoming, Youth Development

April 4, 2011 At the end of the week I travel to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), a huge gathering (probably 14,000!) of mostly PhDs and graduate students involved in studying teaching and learning. Over five days, there will be many hundreds of...

03 Mar

Posted at 03:23h in Activity Theory, Applied Theatre, Community Organizing, Culture, Education, Health Care, Human Development, Learning Environments, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodern Marxism, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapeutics, Social Therapy, Vygotsky, Youth Development

March 3, 2010 Please help me publicize a unique program—The International Class. I began this seven years ago and had no idea how much it would help me and all its participants grow, or how powerful the impact would be on community organizers and talented educators and peformers, or what a...

31 Jan

Posted at 00:34h in Activity Theory, Culture, Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, Outside of School, Performance Movement, Politics, Psychology of Becoming, Social Therapeutics, Vygotsky, Youth Development

January 30, 2011 “Here is an idea for solving the education crisis in America. What if all the kids currently failing in school pretended to be good learners? What if all the adults – teachers, principals, administrators, parents – played along and pretended that the kids were school achievers, heading for...

26 Jan

Posted at 18:59h in Community Organizing, Culture, Human Development, Learning Environments, Outside of School, Psychology of Becoming, Theatre, Vygotsky, Youth Development

January 26, 2011 A young friend of mine, Francelli Chapman, keeps a very active blog that I’m learning a lot from. An example: This great quote from Maya Angelou’s book, Letter to My Daughter—“Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.” Francelli calls her blog, “The...